Overview

Though businesses increasingly rely on technology, technological skills alone do not guarantee success in the workplace. You must still develop your ideas, express them clearly, and persuade others of their viability. This course offers effective strategies to sharpen your writing skills by structuring your ideas logically, exercising diplomacy in letters and reports, and shaping your arguments. In contemporary business environments, information overload makes it necessary for you to communicate clearly and concisely. Trying to make sense of a disorganized email message can be frustrating given the number of emails you have to answer daily. By analyzing your audience, organizing your writing, and employing effective persuasive techniques, your writing will make an impact. This course is for individuals who need to write clearly and concisely in a professional environment. In this course, you will organize and write effective business documents. You will: • Identify techniques to write effective business communication. • Write electronic communication that is clear, concise, and appropriate in a business context. • Apply the writing principles you have studied to specific business situations and learn to address the needs of a particular audience. • Use your writing and diplomatic skills to create formal business letters. • Use basic persuasive strategies that will allow you to plan and deliver effective proposals.

Syllabus

Writing Effective Business Communication

Effective business writing begins with an understanding of how to organize your content and analyze your audience. To write content that will effectively and professionally communicate your intended message, you have to know who will be reading it, and you have to organize and format it in a way that will have the greatest impact. In this lesson, you will identify techniques to write effective business communication.

Writing Email and Other Electronic Communication

Information flows at lightning speed, making older forms of business communication increasingly obsolete. Instead of elaborate letters and memos, businesses rely more and more on rapid exchanges of email, to audiences both inside and outside of a company. In this lesson, you will write electronic communication that is clear, concise, and appropriate in a business context. If you don't write emails in a professional manner, others might question your competence or to respond negatively to your requests. Good writing is a reflection of your professionalism.

Writing Common Business Documents

In the previous lesson, you learned how to plan and write basic electronic business messages. Yet writing always occurs in a specific context that you have to adjust to. In this topic, you will apply the writing principles you have studied to specific business situations and learn to address the needs of a particular audience. Not only does business writing require organization and planning, but it often demands diplomacy. You have to consider how your writing affects others. By using basic strategies for responding to requests for information and for delivering bad news, you can write strong communications that are also diplomatic.

Writing a Business Letter

In the previous lesson, you identified writing strategies and applied them to specific business scenarios, customizing your message for particular audiences. Although you conduct much of your business correspondence through email, there are times when a letter format is necessary. In this lesson, you will use your writing and diplomatic skills to create formal business letters. There are certain times when the formality of communicating through a letter is required. Unfortunately, you may only vaguely recall how a business letter is properly structured. You could guess, but if you guess wrong, you might make a bad impression. Polished business letters convey your professionalism and project your company's image.

Writing Business Proposals

In previous lessons, you learned to write effective business correspondence that is essentially meant to inform. But much business writing has a different purpose: to persuade. In this lesson, you will use basic persuasive strategies that will allow you to plan and deliver effective proposals. The quality of your ideas does not always guarantee that your proposals will be accepted. By learning persuasive strategies, you can improve your odds of success by constructing business proposals that are both logically and emotionally compelling.